Dr. Wolfgang Pike would love nothing more than to finish the requiem he's composing for his late wife, but the ending seems as hopeless as the patients dying a hundred yards away at the Waverly Hills Tuberculosis sanatorium.

If he can't ease his own pain with music, he tries to ease theirs--but his boss thinks music is a waste, and in 1920s Louisville, the specter of racial tensions looms over everything. When a retired concert pianist arrives, Wolfgang is thrust into an orchestra of the most extraordinary kind that emerges to change everything.